Title: 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself : Change Your Life Forever author

94. Give yourself flying lessons
We need heroes in our lives. They are not a sign of weakness; they are a
source of strength. "Without heroes," said Bernard Malamud, "we are
all plain people and we don't know how far we can go."
Heroes show us what's possible for a human being to accomplish.
Therefore, heroes are very useful to anyone who is in the process of
finally understanding self-motivation. But unless we consciously select
our heroes in order to use them as inspiration, we simply end up envying
great people instead of emulating them.
When used properly, a hero can be an enriching source of energy and
inspiration. You don't have to have just one hero, either. Choose a
number of them. Put their pictures up. Become an expert on their lives.
Collect books about them.
My youngest sister, Cindy, as a shy little girl, always admired Amelia
Earhardt. Not long ago, after she had reached her 30s, she revealed to
me that she had been taking flying lessons. I was stunned! A few weeks
after that, the family went out to a little airport outside of town to watch
her fly her first solo. "I was so scared," said Cindy, "that my mouth and
throat went completely dry."
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Flying has nothing to do with what Cindy does for a living—she just
took lessons and learned to pilot a plane because of the impression that
her hero, Amelia Earhardt, made on her as a little girl.
"We grow into that which we admire," said Emmet Fox.
Before he became a famous author, Napoleon Hill was struggling as a
writer and speaker. He had a friend whose restaurant business was not
doing well and Hill offered to give free motivational speeches at the

restaurant one night a week to help his friend increase his business. The
speeches helped his friend a little, but they helped Hill a lot. He began
to gain a large following.
When I read about that part of Hill's life, it gave me an idea. At the time
I wanted to be a full-time speaker and I didn't know where to begin. I'd
done a few seminars and talks here and there, but there was no pattern
or purposeful direction to it. I decided to emulate Hill. I began putting
on a free, open-to-the-public workshop every Thursday night at the
company where I was working as a marketing director.
At first, the workshops were not well attended. I had to spend part of
the week begging people to come. Once the audience was two people!
But week by week the workshop's reputation grew and my own
experience grew along with it. Soon we had large audiences waiting to
get in on Thursday nights, and I credit that little free workshop with
putting me into full-time public speaking.
Was it an original idea? No, I stole it. I copied a hero of mine. But our
awareness of the choice involving heroes is vital for self-creation. We
can envy them or we can emulate them.
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The best use of heroes is not to just be in awe of them, but to learn
something from them. To let their lives inspire us. They are only people
like we are. What distinguishes them from us is the great levels they've
reached in self-motivation. To passively adore them is to insult our own
potential. Instead of looking up to our heroes, it is much more beneficial
to look into them.
95. Hold your vision accountable
"It's not what a vision is," says Robert Fritz "it's what a vision does."
What does your vision do? Does it give you energy? Does it make you
smile? Does it get you up in the morning? When you're tired, does it
take you that extra mile? A vision should be judged by these criteria, the
criteria of power and effectiveness. What does it do?
Robert Fritz is widely quoted in Peter Senge's business masterpiece, The
Fifth Discipline. Fritz is a former musician who has taken the basic
principles of creativity in music composition and applied them to
creating successful professional lives. Life gets good, he argues, when
we get clear on what we want to create.
Most people spend most of their waking hours trying to make problems
go away. This lifelong crusade to solve one's problems is a negative and
reactive existence. It sells us short and leaves us at the end of life (or at
the end of the day) with, at best, the double-negative feeling of "fewer
problems"!

"There is a profound difference between problem solving and creating,"
Fritz points out in The Path of Least Resistance.
"Problem solving is taking action to have something go away—the
problem. Creating is taking action to have something come into
being—the creation. Most of us
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have been raised in a tradition of problem-solving and have little real
exposure to the creative process."
Step one in the creative process is having a vision of what you want to
create. Without this vision, there is no way to create. Without this
vision, you are only problem-eliminating, which is a double negative. It's
impossible to feel positive about a life based on a double negative.
So the way to alter your thinking is to notice when you're drifting into,
"What do I want to get rid of?" and mentally replace that thinking with,
"What do I want to bring into being?"
When Fritz says that we have been "raised in a tradition" of problem
solving, he is almost understating it. We are programmed and wired to
think that way every day. Notice the thinking of people as they
approach a challenge (even a challenge as small as an upcoming
meeting with other people):
"Here's what I hope doesn't happen," one will say. "Well, here's how
you can avoid that," someone else will helpfully say. "The only problem
we have is this," a third person will say, attempting to make the meeting
seem less frightening.
Notice that nowhere was there the question, "What would we like to
bring into being as a result of this meeting?"
Whether the situation is as small as a meeting or as large as your whole
life, the most useful question you can ask yourself is, "What do I want
to bring into being?"
It's a beautiful question, because it makes no reference to problems or
obstacles. It implies pure creativity. It puts you back on the positive side
of life.
My friend Steve Hardison made an observation about self-motivation
that I have always remembered and agreed with.
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"It's just one thought," he said. "Motivational teachers repeat it many
different ways, but it's just one thought: It's a binary system. Are you on
or are you off?"
Are you positive or are you negative? Are you creating or are you

reacting? Are you on or are you off? Are you life or are you death? Are
you day or are you night? Are you in or are you out? "Is you is or is you
ain't?"
And there's nothing more motivational to flip your binary switch to "on"
than a clear vision of what it is that you really want. What do you want
to bring into being? It doesn't matter what that vision is or how often it
changes. It only matters what that vision does.
If your vision isn't getting you up in the morning, then make up another
one. Keep at it until you develop a vision that's so colorful and clear
that it puts you in action just to think about it.
96. Build your power base
Knowledge is power. What you know is your power base—it's the
battery you run on. You need to charge it constantly and consciously.
Who do you want to be in charge of what you know? News directors?
Radio disc jockeys? The office gossip? Tabloid newspaper editors? A
pessimistic family member?
Unless we consciously decide to build our own knowledge base, with a
sense of direction to it, then we will be programmed, totally, by random
input.
Feeling miserable and alienated from life is caused by not being in
control of what we know.
"Misery and alienation are not laid upon us by fate," wrote Colin
Wilson. "They are due to the failure of the ego to accept its role as the
controller of consciousness. All our experiences of happiness and
intensity force the
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same conviction upon us, for they involve a sense of mastery."
You can be the master of your own fate. You can make choices all day
long about what you are going to learn and what you are not going to
learn.
"What are you reading over there?" someone may ask you. "Oh, it's just
something I found in the trash," you might say.
And it might seem harmless enough to read something you found in the
wastebasket because there was nothing else nearby, but whole lives are
shaped that way. The computer term "GIGO"—garbage in, garbage
out—is even truer for the human biocomputer than it is for mechanical
computers.
Take control of what you know. The more you know about what
motivates you, the easier it is to motivate yourself. The more you know
about the human brain, the less trouble you have operating it.
Knowledge is power. Respect yours and build on it.

97. Connect truth to beauty
I hate reading motivational material that thunders at me about the
importance of integrity and honesty for their own sake. Somehow, that
always seems to turn me off, because the writers come off like angry
preachers and teachers. Hardly inspiring.
I'm always inspired better by things that are made to look interesting
and fun. I'm always taken in by a promise of life being more beautiful
and rarely taken in by a promise of a life being more righteous and
proper.
To me, the best case to make for honesty is how beautiful it is...how
clean and clear it makes the journey from current reality to the dream.
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When people know exactly where they are, they can go somewhere
from there. But being "lost" is a function of dishonesty. And when we're
lost, or dishonest, anywhere we go from there is wrong. When we start
with a false reading, there's no direction home.
Like Bob Dylan's rolling stone, we don't know who we are. We feel, at
the core, "like a complete unknown."
Truth, on the other hand, is clear, complete, and compellingly vivid. It is
solid and strong, so it can hold us steady as we climb.
"Truth," said poet John Keats, "is beauty."
The more honest we are with others and ourselves about current reality,
the more energy and focus we gather. We don't have to keep track of
what we told one person or what we told another.
One of the best and most positive explanations of the beauty of personal
integrity was expressed by Nathaniel Branden in The Six Pillars of
Self-Esteem. Branden, unlike most writers on the subject, sees truth and
integrity as a positive part of the process of self-esteem. His point is not
that we owe it to other people's sense of morality to be honest, but that
we owe it to ourselves.
"One of the great self-deceptions," said Branden, "is to tell oneself,
'Only I will know.' Only I will know that I am a liar; only I will know
that I deal unethically with people who trust me; only I will know that I
have no intention of honoring my promise. The implication is that my
judgment is unimportant and that only the judgment of others counts."
Branden's writing on personal integrity is inspiring because it's directed
at creating a happier and stronger self, not at a universal appeal for
morality.
One of the ways we describe a work of art that is sloppy and unfinished
is as "a mess." The problem with
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lying, or lying by omission, is that it leaves everything so
incomplete—in a mess. Truth always completes the picture—any
picture. And when a picture is complete, whole, and integrated, we see
it as "beautiful."
I'll even hear about people—usually people who you can't believe about
anything—described as "a mess." And conversely, a person who you
can always count on to be honest with you is often referred to as a
"beautiful" person. Truth and beauty become impossible to separate.
Truth leads you to a more confident level in your relationships with
others and with yourself. It diminishes fear and increases your sense of
personal mastery. Lies and half-truths will always weigh you down,
whereas truth will clear up your thinking and give you the energy and
clarity needed for self-motivation.
98. Read yourself a story
Abraham Lincoln used to drive his law partners to distraction. Every
morning he would come into his office and read the daily newspaper
aloud to himself. They would hear him in the next room reading in a
booming voice.
Why did Lincoln do his morning reading aloud? He had discovered that
he remembered and retained twice as much when he read aloud than
when he read silently. And what he did remember, he remembered for a
much longer period of time.
Perhaps it was because Lincoln was employing a second sense, the
sense of hearing, and a second activity, the activity of speaking, which
made his readings so memorable to him.
Any time you have an opportunity to read something that is important
to you, try reading it aloud and see if you don't make twice the
impression on yourself. When
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you discover something you want to remember, and draw upon in the
future, read it aloud.
Steve Hardison, one of the most successful business consultants I have
ever known, credits one origin of his success to when he was a
struggling young man without money or a clue about where he wanted
to go. Then one day he came across Napoleon Hill's enormous book,
Law of Success, and read the entire volume aloud.
My favorite piece of writing to read aloud is Chapter 16 of Og
Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the World. Here's a part of it,
which you may now read silently to yourself. However, if you want a

real shot of adrenaline to your spirit, I recommend you mark this page
and when you're alone, read it aloud like Lincoln:
"I will act now. I will act now. I will act now. Henceforth, I will repeat
these words again and again, each hour, each day, every day, until the
words become a habit as my breathing and the actions which follow
become as instinctive as the blinking of my eyelids. With these words I
can condition my mind to perform every act necessary for my success.
With these words I can condition my mind to meet every challenge."
99. Laugh for no reason
Become a performer. Be an actor and a singer. Act like you already feel
like you want to feel. Don't wait until the feeling motivates you. It could
be a long wait.
American philosopher William James put it very clearly: "We do not
sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing."
Most of us believe an emotion, such as happiness, comes first. Then we
do whatever we do, in reaction to that particular emotion. Not so,
insisted James. The emotion arises simultaneously with the doing of the
act. So if
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you want to be enthusiastic, you can get there by acting as if you were
already enthusiastic. Sometimes it takes a minute. Sometimes it skips a
beat. But it always works if you stay with it, no matter how ridiculous
you feel doing it.
Feel ridiculous. If you want to be happy, find the happiest song you
know and sing it. It works. Not always in the first few moments, but if
you keep at it, it works. Just fake it until you make it. Soon your happy
singing will show you how much control you do have over your own
emotions.
Zen monks do a "laughing meditation" in which they all gather in a
circle and get ready to laugh. At the stroke of a certain hour the teacher
hits a gong, and all the monks begin to laugh. They have to laugh,
whether or not they feel like it. But after a few moments the laughter
becomes contagious. Soon all the monks are laughing genuinely and
heartily.
Children do this, too. They start giggling for no reason (often at the
dinner table or some other forbidden setting and the giggling itself
makes them laugh). The truth is this: Laughter itself can make you
laugh. The secret of happiness is hidden inside that last sentence.
But adults aren't always comfortable with this. Adults want kids to have
reasons for laughing. As I used to drive my children long distances to
visit relatives, I'd get most irritated when they began laughing and

giggling in the back seat without reason. I developed a backstroke swing
to curb the laughter. "Why are you laughing?" I would shout. "You have
no reason to be laughing! This is a dangerous highway and I'm trying to
drive here!"
But adults, like me, might want to get back that appreciation for joyful
spontaneity. We might want to confront the question, "What is the one
thing that most
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makes me feel like singing?" And then know the answer: "Singing."
What most gets you in the mood to dance? Dancing. The next time you
ask someone to dance, and they say, "I don't feel like dancing," you
might reply, "That's because you're not dancing."
100. Walk with love and death
"I am a coward."
That was how the book began. It was a novel I was reading not long
after I had graduated from high school, and those first words staggered
me. I remember staring at those words, unable to continue reading, I
was so stunned. Never has a book connected with me so quickly.
For I was a coward, too. It's just that I never admitted it so openly as did
the author of A Walk with Love and Death.
The author was Hans Konigsberger, and the book was a medieval love
story later made into a movie by John Huston, but none of that
mattered. What mattered was that there was another coward on the
planet other than me. Even if he was fictional, the words were real
enough for me.
My self-image at the time I read that book was based on my fears and
nothing else. In my mind, I was truly a coward. And if someone were to
tell me I'd done something brave, I'd think they were wrong somehow.
Or that they didn't know how easy that thing was.
Where did this self-image come from? I don't blame my parents,
because I believe we create our own pictures of ourselves, and I had a
choice whether to stick with this self-image or not. (After all, I could
have done what Gordon Liddy did when he was a boy—upset that he
was afraid of rats, he caught some, cooked them, and
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ate them. Upset that he was afraid of thunder and lightning, he strapped
himself to the top of a large tree where he stayed for the duration during
a major electrical storm. These kinds of things I did not do.)
Although I don't blame my parents, I can trace where I got the idea of

my being a coward to their encouragement.
My mother, too, was afraid of everything. She lived to the age of 66
without ever having made a left hand turn in traffic, so afraid she was of
oncoming traffic. (She always knew how to make a looping series of
right turns to get where she was going.) She consoled me and told me
that I was just like her. A coward, I thought. She was very loving and
empathetic about it, but my self-image became unshakable. However,
my mother said she'd try to be there to help me do the many things she
knew I wouldn't be able to do.
I met my father when I was two and a half years old. He was a war
hero, home from World War II, and it is reported that when he walked
into our home and saw me for the first time, I looked up at his imposing
uniformed figure and said, "Who is that?"
"John Wayne," my mother should have said.
Because my father was afraid of nothing. He was a decorated soldier, a
star athlete, a tough and successful businessman, and the list goes on.
But he soon knew one thing about his little boy—no guts. And it was
distressing to him.
So, both parents and the child himself were all in agreement about it.
The father was upset about it, the mother understood, and the boy was
just scared.
That is possibly why, as I grew older, I discovered "false courage."
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I discovered—through use of an intoxicating substance—that I could be
who I wanted to be. But soon the marvelous discovery turned to
addiction, and my life revolved around my dependency on it. They were
wild times, but as anyone will tell you who's been through it, there was
no growth or fulfillment during those years. They soon became an
intolerable nightmare.
Fortunately, I recovered. It has been more than 20 years since I've had
to resort to chemically based courage. During that recovery period,
which was often difficult, I came to learn a prayer that was popular
among fellow recovering people. They called it "The Serenity Prayer"
and you've probably heard it. It goes like this: "God grant me the
serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the
things I can and the wisdom to know the difference."
I think it was called the "serenity" prayer because that's what everyone
wanted from the prayer—serenity. Abruptly ending a long period of
substance abuse can leave you far short of serene. Although with each
passing day it gets better and better, that prayer was something to hang
on to.

But after being clean and sober started to work for me, I knew
something was still missing—I knew I needed more than serenity. My
deep-seated self-image of being a coward had not gone away, and so I
turned my attention to the second line in the prayer, "the courage to
change the things I can." In my mind, it was no longer the serenity
prayer—it had become the courage prayer.
Courage was still what I lacked, and that feeling of personal cowardice
was still my entire self-image. It shaped my whole "personality."
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When my friend Mike Killebrew gave me Napoleon Hill's The Master
Key to Riches, the answer to my courage prayer began to come to me.
If I didn't have the courage inside of me, I would create it. And at that
moment, the process of self-motivation began in earnest.
I could cite you many examples of the fears I had, but to illustrate how I
overcame them, I'll use an example I referred to earlier—my fear of
public speaking. I've since learned that the fear of public speaking is not
unique to me. In fact, it's considered the number-one fear among our
population today, even greater than the fear of death.
To me, though, it was a painful manifestation of the overall deep fear
that constituted my entire personality. I laughed knowingly once when
Woody Allen said that he was "afraid of the dark and feared the light of
day." That was me.
When I finally made myself join an acting class to face my fear of
speaking, I learned to my horror that I was the only non-actor in the
class. In our first session, led by the hugely talented actress and coach
Judy Rollings, I listened as everyone in the class talked about all the
recent stage productions they had been in.
Judy gave us each a long monologue to learn and recite in the next
session. Mine was from Spoon River Anthology and my character was a
judge who had been mocked as a young man, but rose to judge those in
the community who used to make fun of him. It was a challenging
piece, and I was terrified.
I knew I had to do something harder than the recital to prepare for the
recital, so I set out to do it. I memorized my part and began to perform it
in front of people. I asked whoever would listen to sit down and watch
me recite this piece. I did it in front of my actress friend Judy LeBeau,
who had gotten me into the class. I
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did it on tape and sent it to songwriter and comedian Fred Knipe. I did it

in front of my friend Kathy. I made my children sit quietly and watch
me do it over and over. Each time, I was scared, my heart was pounding
and I hyperventilated. But each time it got easier and better.
Finally the day of the class arrived. I took the day off from work to
rehearse this little three-minute piece all day. When class time arrived, I
was extremely nervous, but not deeply panicked. In my life, there's a
big and welcome difference.
Judy Rollings asked for volunteers to perform their monologues, and as
each "experienced" actor got up to do theirs, I gained confidence. I
could see that they, too, were very nervous. They were acting in front
of peers, which is sometimes harder than before a normal audience.
They were blowing their lines and, in embarrassment, asking to start
over. Some of their voices were a little shaky. I was encouraged.
Finally, with just one or two of us left to go, I volunteered and walked
slowly to the front of the room.
What happened then is something I'll never forget. As I went to the
front of the room, just before I turned around to face the teacher and
class, a voice in my mind spoke to me, and it said only one word:
Showtime.
With a surprising surge of energy, I delivered my piece. My voice
soared up and hit the dramatic points and dropped down to emphasize
the subtle lines and the parts that I gave a funny interpretation to were
drawing huge laughs from the class. When I was finished, I looked back
up and saw that the whole class had burst out clapping—something
Judy had told them not to do for anybody.
When I drove home that night, I was in heaven. I kept reciting my
monologue out loud, reveling in the
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memory of their laughter and clapping. The thing I thought I feared
most in life was somehow mastered. And I repeated to myself the
principle I had used to make it happen—the more I sweat in peacetime,
the less I bleed in war.
I often look back on who I was when I first encountered the words, "I
am a coward," in A Walk With Love and Death. And I realize that today
I have something that I didn't have back then, the knowledge that
courage can be created.
I still have fears, but I no longer am fear. I no longer think of myself as
a coward. And when people compliment me on something I've done that
they think was courageous, I don't dismiss them as being crazy or
stupid.
There is a way I use to motivate myself to overcome any fear that's in

my way today. It's a way I've never told anyone about until now,
because it has a strange name. I call it "walk with love and death."
When I need to get through something, face something, or create a
courageous action plan—I take long walks. When I walk long and far
enough, a solution always appears. I eventually get oriented to the most
creative course of action.
"When you walk," writes Andrew Weil in Spontaneous Healing, "the
movement of your limbs is cross-patterned: the right leg and left arm
move forward at the same time, then the left leg and right arm. This
type of movement generates electrical activity in the brain that has a
harmonizing influence on the central nervous system—a special benefit
of walking that you do not necessarily get from other kinds of exercise."
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I call it "a walk with love" because love and fear are opposites. (Most
people think love and hate are opposites, but they are not.) The ultimate
creativity occurs from a spirit of love and, as Emmet Fox says, "Love is
always creative, and fear is always destructive."
I call it a "walk with death," because it is only the acceptance and
awareness of my own death that gives my life the clarity that it needs to
be exciting.
My walks often last a long time. Somehow, whatever challenge I'm
facing appears to me from many different angles as I'm walking. I know
that one of the real values is that while walking, I'm truly alone with
myself—there are no phones to answer or people to talk to. I create so
little of that kind of time in life, that it's always surprising how beneficial
it is.
Take your own challenges out for a walk. Feel your self-motivation
growing inside you, as the electricity in your brain starts to harmonize
your central nervous system. You'll soon know for a fact that you have
what it takes. You won't have to pray for the courage to change the
things you can—you will already have it.
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